Thursday’s child…

…has far to go in order to be a bright, sunny day. It is overcast and cold today. Even Thor, the big, smart-alecky Siberian, opted for the warm indoors today. When I opened the back door, four bullets ran me over. They are now wandering through my studio, investigating everything as though they haven’t seen it all dozens of times already. But they have already lost interest in Moya, who sits on the desk like royalty, with yet another new warp on her.

This particular warp is giving me fits. I wanted a lot of colors in this one, but I still wanted to do pick-up weave, as I’m addicted to it, so it’s set up for horizontal stripes in various colors ranging from black to several different browns to more shades of pink, with some burgundy, teal, and purple thrown in for interest. It’s all embroidery floss, because I like the sheen that floss has to it, and the little skeins are not only perfect, lengthwise, for a full warp on Moya, but are also cheap (Of course, cheap is relative…I spent $35 on floss not too long ago, at $.35 per skein, which tells you how much floss I brought home)! Being embroidery floss, each skein goes around all of the pegs twice, which is great. But when I’m doing pick-up, all of the pattern threads are all the same color, and all need to be open, meaning between the heddles, not in them. This means that I’m tying on each individual thread. This also means that, taking all of the “mom” and “wife” interruptions into account, it took me two solid days to put the whole warp on. So one could imagine that I was not very thrilled to realize that I had done something wrong.

Moya is not like a lot of the inkle looms I have seen for sale. Most of them are open on one side. Moya has two sides, to lend strength to the pegs. One side is removable, for ease of warping, and held in place by two screws by the base, and the tension bar. In order to put the side back on, you have to loosen the tension bar; there’s no way around it, and up until now, it hasn’t been an issue. With this warp, though, something went horribly awry, and I don’t even know what it was. The warp was rutting perfect until I loosened the tension bar to put the side back on. Once I did that and retightened the tension bar, the right side of the warp was extremely tight, and the left side was extremely loose. I don’t have any idea what happened, or how, and after several attempts at fixing the problem, I finally gave up and decided to leave it as a practice band and keep going. Oddly enough, it seems to be evening out now. Very strange. I wish I knew what had gone wrong, so I could make sure it didn’t happen again. And with any luck, maybe this band will come out decently!